I've been meaning to get around to this all week, but had other pressing things that kept me from it, so I'll leave this for everyone to chew on over the weekend.

A very interesting letter to the editor showed up in The Leader-Herald last weekend from a woman who's serving six months in the Fulton County jail for having an "inappropriate" relationship with a 15-year-old boy (You can read the letter by clicking here).

LeeAnn Sager explains how she met the boy in a Gloversville bar and had no idea he was only 15 until meeting his family at a picnic, at which time she halted the relationship.

OK, I'm not going to say whether I believe her story or not, but the concept brings up an interesting question: Should a woman (or even a man) be held criminally responsible if she (he) reasonably yet incorrectly believes someone she (he) had sex with is of legal age?

If the story is as Ms. Sager says it is, I think you'd have to have at least a little sympathy for her. If I meet someone in a bar, I'm not going to be stupid enough to simply assume they're 21 or older, but I would say it's totally reasonable to assume they're at least 17 (the legal age of consent in New York state).

You can make any judgment you want about a 25-year-old woman (Sager's age when she was arrested last November) having a relationship with a 17-year-old boy - I personally won't because I can think of many couples I have known through the years with age differences as great or greater - but it's not illegal. The question comes down to whether she should have reasonably known her boyfriend was actually only 15, and - again assuming the story is true for the sake of this argument - unless she sees him playing with his Pokemon cards, I can't see how you can say that. Come to think of it, I know some adults who play with Pokemon cards, so there goes even that argument.

This may not play a factor in whether she actually broke the law or not (one of my father's favorite expressions - usually made after I had screwed up in my younger years - is "Ignorance of the law is no excuse"), but you would think it would have at least been considered as a mitigating factor when she was sentenced.

I'm a father of three, so I believe just as much as anybody else in doing all we can to protect children. But as the father of one teenager who is just starting to hit those rebellious years, I am also a firm believer in forcing them to take responsibility for their own actions, as well.

That's hard to do in this case, since the boy is guilty of no crime (and is probably considered a hero by his peers), but perhaps the woman deserves at least a bit of compassion. Given the facts as laid out in her letter, she certainly didn't deserve to go to jail.